With 5 multi-million user titles already, MegaZebra CEO Henning Kosmack shared what they learned about choosing the next titles, setting up teams and creating ever-green franchises. During his presentation at Casual Connect Tel Aviv, Henning advised,”Go for evergreen potential because the long tail of the game can be very profitable.”
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Since the indie games boom began, there’s been no shortage of developers grappling with the many facets of running a business. Henning Kosmack, CEO of Munich-based social game studio MegaZebra, has benefited from a very different angle of attack. Before co-founding MegaZebra in 2008, Henning worked in M&A, venturing and partnering at Siemens’ Mobile Networks, where he built a background in investment and entrepreneurship.
From Investment to Social Games
Games on the other hand were rather new to Kosmack, and he wasn’t even that interested in video games in his younger years as well. “Actually, not much pointed in this direction. I programmed some super simple games in BASIC when I was 12 or so, but I always sucked at computer games,” Henning says. “I lived out my competitive urges in numerous sports. It was not until social games emerged that I realized that gaming can also be fun for less-skilled gamers like myself.”
Henning also elaborated that when he entered the industry seven years ago, he had to learn game development from scratch during a time when gaming underwent one of the biggest changes in its industry and business model. At MegaZebra’s beginning, they had one person coding and one person on art, so Henning says he fell into the role of game designer. “So our most classic game is still based around my early ideas,” he says. “When marketing, analytics, HR and financing took up more time, my co-founder luckily discovered a passion for game design, too. So, that is how we continued from there on.”
His love of numbers also came into play, and MegaZebra became one of the first studios to focus heavily on data-driven design.
Creativity Isn’t Cut-and-Dried Work
Henning believes creativity shouldn’t necessarily follow a single, strict process. “In fact, I’m not sure that following a bullet list is the best way to be creative,” he says. “We try to be creative about creativity, too.”
You just need to ensure the creativity is channeled in the right direction, meaning creative aspects of a project are undertaken by the best-suited person and then subjected to the same scrutiny as everything else, he says. Game developers are passionate, which can be a strength as well as a weakness. You need that passion and drive to make good games, but it can also give you strong biases toward your own work. That’s why it’s important to be able to step back from your work and examine it purely from an end-user and business standpoint.
“This might sound a bit ‘mainstream’ and not very creative,” Henning says, “But at MegaZebra, we believe that success comes from using both sides of the brain, the creative and the analytical. Alone, each runs a risk of straying off.”
He describes the learning curve as “enormous,” but the search for something new and challenging was what led him to the industry in the first place. His advice, from his gig as game designer and his experience as a developer and investor: “But don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ll be a great game designer (for example) just because you like to play games yourself. Personally, I like to eat, but I’m a terrible cook. In the games industry, I see this rather frequently and it can cause a lot of frustration on both sides.”
Getting it Perfect
Still, making games fun should be the most challenging and most rewarding aspect of working in the industry. With other online services, you can list necessary features, and then if you check them all off, the service should work. There’s no set recipe for fun and games have to entertain on top of functioning well. He says he hasn’t found an all-inclusive checklist for games, and as he’s seen other studios struggle with follow-up hits, he’s prone to think such there isn’t such a list.
“Getting something right and fun, irrespective of all the competition and noise in the market, that is then an unbeatable feeling,” he says.
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